VLSI Project
Encyclopedia
DARPA's VLSI Project provided research funding to a wide variety of university
-based teams in an effort to improve the state of the art
in microprocessor
design, then known as VLSI
. Although little known, notably in comparison to their work on what became the internet
, the VLSI Project is likely one of the most influential research projects in modern computer history. Its offspring include the RISC processor concept, many of the CAD tools still in use today, 32-bit
graphics workstations, fabless design houses
and its own fab, MOSIS
. A similar DARPA project partnering with industry, VHSIC
, is generally considered to have had little or no impact.
The Project was the brainchild of Caltech professor Carver Mead
and Xerox PARC
programmer Lynn Conway
in the late 1970s. At the time microprocessor design was plateauing at the 100,000 transistor
level because the tools available to the designers were simply unable to deal with more complex designs. 16-bit
and 16/32-bit designs were coming to market, but beyond that seemed too difficult and expensive to contemplate. Mead and Conway felt that there was no theoretical problem impeding progress, simply a number of practical ones, and set about solving these in order to make much more complex designs possible.
One of the primary efforts under VLSI was the creation of the hardware and software needed to automate the design process, which at that point was still largely manual. For a design containing hundreds of thousands of transistors, there was simply no machine short of a supercomputer
that had the memory and performance needed to work on the design as a whole.
To address this problem and allow "average" companies to use automated tools, VLSI funded the Geometry Engine and Pixel-Planes projects at Stanford University
and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
(respectively) to create suitable graphics hardware at the desktop level. The former evolved into an effort to design a networked CAD workstation, known as the Stanford University Network. This is better known today under its acronym, "SUN", as in Sun Microsystems
, which commercialized the design.
To provide a common software platform to run these new tools, VLSI also funded a Berkeley project to provide a standardized Unix
implementation, known today as the Berkeley Software Distribution
(BSD). Almost all early workstations used BSD, including designs that evolved into Sun, SGI
, Apollo Computer
, and others.
BSD later spawned several descendants, OpenBSD
, FreeBSD
, NetBSD
, and DragonFlyBSD.
CAD software was an important part of the VLSI effort. This led to major improvements in CAD technology for layout, design rule checking, and simulation. The tools developed in this program were used extensively in both academic research programs and in industry. The ideas were developed in commercial implementations by companies such as VLSI Technology
, Cadnetix, and Synopsis.
With these tools in hand, other VLSI funded projects were able to make huge strides in design complexity, sparking off the RISC revolution. The two major VLSI-related projects were Berkeley RISC
and Stanford MIPS, both of which relied heavily on the tools developed in previous VLSI projects. To allow design teams to produce test examples, the project also funded the building of their own fabrication facility, MOSIS (Metal Oxide Semiconductor Implementation Service), which received plans electronically. MOSIS
remains in operation today.
Another important part of their fabrication process was the development of the multichip wafer, which allowed a single wafer of silicon to be used to produce several chip designs at the same time. Previously a wafer would normally be used to produce a single design, which meant that there was a definite minimum production run one could consider starting up. In contrast the multichip wafer a small batch of a chip could be produced in the middle of a larger run, dramatically lowering the startup cost and prototyping stage.
University
A university is an institution of higher education and research, which grants academic degrees in a variety of subjects. A university is an organisation that provides both undergraduate education and postgraduate education...
-based teams in an effort to improve the state of the art
State of the art
The state of the art is the highest level of development, as of a device, technique, or scientific field, achieved at a particular time. It also refers to the level of development reached at any particular time as a result of the latest methodologies employed.- Origin :The earliest use of the term...
in microprocessor
Microprocessor
A microprocessor incorporates the functions of a computer's central processing unit on a single integrated circuit, or at most a few integrated circuits. It is a multipurpose, programmable device that accepts digital data as input, processes it according to instructions stored in its memory, and...
design, then known as VLSI
Very-large-scale integration
Very-large-scale integration is the process of creating integrated circuits by combining thousands of transistors into a single chip. VLSI began in the 1970s when complex semiconductor and communication technologies were being developed. The microprocessor is a VLSI device.The first semiconductor...
. Although little known, notably in comparison to their work on what became the internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
, the VLSI Project is likely one of the most influential research projects in modern computer history. Its offspring include the RISC processor concept, many of the CAD tools still in use today, 32-bit
32-bit
The range of integer values that can be stored in 32 bits is 0 through 4,294,967,295. Hence, a processor with 32-bit memory addresses can directly access 4 GB of byte-addressable memory....
graphics workstations, fabless design houses
Fabless semiconductor company
A fabless semiconductor company specializes in the design and sale of hardware devices and semiconductor chips while outsourcing the fabrication or "fab" of the devices to a specialized manufacturer called a semiconductor foundry...
and its own fab, MOSIS
MOSIS
MOSIS is probably the oldest integrated circuit foundry service and one of the first Internet services other than supercomputing services and basic infrastructure such as E-mail or FTP....
. A similar DARPA project partnering with industry, VHSIC
VHSIC
VHSIC was a 1980s U.S. government program to develop very-high-speed integrated circuits.The United States Department of Defense launched the VHSIC project in 1980 as a joint tri-service project. The project led to advances in integrated circuit materials, lithography, packaging, testing, and...
, is generally considered to have had little or no impact.
The Project was the brainchild of Caltech professor Carver Mead
Carver Mead
Carver Andress Mead is a US computer scientist. He currently holds the position of Gordon and Betty Moore Professor Emeritus of Engineering and Applied Science at the California Institute of Technology , having taught there for over 40 years.Mead studied electrical engineering at Caltech, getting...
and Xerox PARC
Xerox PARC
PARC , formerly Xerox PARC, is a research and co-development company in Palo Alto, California, with a distinguished reputation for its contributions to information technology and hardware systems....
programmer Lynn Conway
Lynn Conway
Lynn Conway is an American computer scientist, electrical engineer, inventor, trans woman, and activist for the transgender community....
in the late 1970s. At the time microprocessor design was plateauing at the 100,000 transistor
Transistor
A transistor is a semiconductor device used to amplify and switch electronic signals and power. It is composed of a semiconductor material with at least three terminals for connection to an external circuit. A voltage or current applied to one pair of the transistor's terminals changes the current...
level because the tools available to the designers were simply unable to deal with more complex designs. 16-bit
16-bit
-16-bit architecture:The HP BPC, introduced in 1975, was the world's first 16-bit microprocessor. Prominent 16-bit processors include the PDP-11, Intel 8086, Intel 80286 and the WDC 65C816. The Intel 8088 was program-compatible with the Intel 8086, and was 16-bit in that its registers were 16...
and 16/32-bit designs were coming to market, but beyond that seemed too difficult and expensive to contemplate. Mead and Conway felt that there was no theoretical problem impeding progress, simply a number of practical ones, and set about solving these in order to make much more complex designs possible.
One of the primary efforts under VLSI was the creation of the hardware and software needed to automate the design process, which at that point was still largely manual. For a design containing hundreds of thousands of transistors, there was simply no machine short of a supercomputer
Supercomputer
A supercomputer is a computer at the frontline of current processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation.Supercomputers are used for highly calculation-intensive tasks such as problems including quantum physics, weather forecasting, climate research, molecular modeling A supercomputer is a...
that had the memory and performance needed to work on the design as a whole.
To address this problem and allow "average" companies to use automated tools, VLSI funded the Geometry Engine and Pixel-Planes projects at Stanford University
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is a public research university located in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States...
(respectively) to create suitable graphics hardware at the desktop level. The former evolved into an effort to design a networked CAD workstation, known as the Stanford University Network. This is better known today under its acronym, "SUN", as in Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...
, which commercialized the design.
To provide a common software platform to run these new tools, VLSI also funded a Berkeley project to provide a standardized Unix
Unix
Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...
implementation, known today as the Berkeley Software Distribution
Berkeley Software Distribution
Berkeley Software Distribution is a Unix operating system derivative developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group of the University of California, Berkeley, from 1977 to 1995...
(BSD). Almost all early workstations used BSD, including designs that evolved into Sun, SGI
Silicon Graphics
Silicon Graphics, Inc. was a manufacturer of high-performance computing solutions, including computer hardware and software, founded in 1981 by Jim Clark...
, Apollo Computer
Apollo Computer
Apollo Computer, Inc., founded 1980 in Chelmsford, Massachusetts by William Poduska and others, developed and produced Apollo/Domain workstations in the 1980s. Along with Symbolics and Sun Microsystems, Apollo was one of the first vendors of graphical workstations in the 1980s...
, and others.
BSD later spawned several descendants, OpenBSD
OpenBSD
OpenBSD is a Unix-like computer operating system descended from Berkeley Software Distribution , a Unix derivative developed at the University of California, Berkeley. It was forked from NetBSD by project leader Theo de Raadt in late 1995...
, FreeBSD
FreeBSD
FreeBSD is a free Unix-like operating system descended from AT&T UNIX via BSD UNIX. Although for legal reasons FreeBSD cannot be called “UNIX”, as the direct descendant of BSD UNIX , FreeBSD’s internals and system APIs are UNIX-compliant...
, NetBSD
NetBSD
NetBSD is a freely available open source version of the Berkeley Software Distribution Unix operating system. It was the second open source BSD descendant to be formally released, after 386BSD, and continues to be actively developed. The NetBSD project is primarily focused on high quality design,...
, and DragonFlyBSD.
CAD software was an important part of the VLSI effort. This led to major improvements in CAD technology for layout, design rule checking, and simulation. The tools developed in this program were used extensively in both academic research programs and in industry. The ideas were developed in commercial implementations by companies such as VLSI Technology
VLSI Technology
VLSI Technology, Inc was a company which designed and manufactured custom and semi-custom ICs. The company was based in Silicon Valley, with headquarters at 1109 McKay Drive in San Jose, California...
, Cadnetix, and Synopsis.
With these tools in hand, other VLSI funded projects were able to make huge strides in design complexity, sparking off the RISC revolution. The two major VLSI-related projects were Berkeley RISC
Berkeley RISC
Berkeley RISC was one of two seminal research projects into RISC-based microprocessor design taking place under ARPA's VLSI project. RISC was led by David Patterson at the University of California, Berkeley between 1980 and 1984, while the other was taking place only a short drive away at Stanford...
and Stanford MIPS, both of which relied heavily on the tools developed in previous VLSI projects. To allow design teams to produce test examples, the project also funded the building of their own fabrication facility, MOSIS (Metal Oxide Semiconductor Implementation Service), which received plans electronically. MOSIS
MOSIS
MOSIS is probably the oldest integrated circuit foundry service and one of the first Internet services other than supercomputing services and basic infrastructure such as E-mail or FTP....
remains in operation today.
Another important part of their fabrication process was the development of the multichip wafer, which allowed a single wafer of silicon to be used to produce several chip designs at the same time. Previously a wafer would normally be used to produce a single design, which meant that there was a definite minimum production run one could consider starting up. In contrast the multichip wafer a small batch of a chip could be produced in the middle of a larger run, dramatically lowering the startup cost and prototyping stage.
Direct outcomes of the VLSI Project
- Sun infosys was an offshoot of the Stanford SUN workstation project
- SGISilicon GraphicsSilicon Graphics, Inc. was a manufacturer of high-performance computing solutions, including computer hardware and software, founded in 1981 by Jim Clark...
's workstation design was based on the Geometry Engine concept - UNC's Pixel-Planes, PixelFlow and WarpEngine series of parallel processor graphics workstations
- Berkeley's RISC turned into SPARCSPARCSPARC is a RISC instruction set architecture developed by Sun Microsystems and introduced in mid-1987....
at Sun Microsystems - Stanford's MIPS are used in many embedded applications such as set-top boxes
- BSD Unix and its derivatives remain a popular system